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9.02.2014

PAX Prime 2014!

This weekend was the 10th anniversary PAX Prime event! "PAX" stands for Penny Arcade Expo, a show to celebrate gaming. PAX Prime is held at the Convention Center in Seattle every year, from Friday to Monday of Labor Day Weekend.

Annie, I think everyone has now seen your bear Tibbers. And yes, that is totally badass smoke rising from his glowing arm. League definitely has their displays down.

Tal and I met up with our friends and started out the show by watching Mikey Neumann, Chief Creative Champion of Gearbox Software (they made the Borderlands series), share stories from his past. He mentioned the stroke he had at 29, some of his horrific experiences with being bullied by his peers, and the ultimate message he left his audience with (paraphrased): Stop picking on others. Stop telling them how to have fun the right way or wrong way (pointing out the ridiculousness statements such as "you're not even a real gamer"). Let games do what they were intended for - to bring joy into the world. Stop crushing other people's joy, hating on leaders of gaming companies, and hating on each other. Girls should be able to play video games without harassment. Everyone should be able to play games without harassment.

That's what I got out of it, anyway. Though a bit tangential for my tastes, it was well-said.

After that, we all headed into the show and walked around the massive halls checking out various exhibits. My own experience with playing games (video or card) lies mostly in the past, due in part to time constraints. Some of the titles I've played include: Math Mountain (early on, but I was addicted to that game), Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, Age of Empires I & II, Donkey Kong, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Super Smash Brothers, Majesty, Shogun: Total War, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft. However, despite only playing them occasionally now, I have so many fond gaming memories that PAX is always a lot of fun, even if I don't follow current gaming news.

As such, I'm not going to attempt to name every booth/game that appears in the pictures. I'm just going to post pictures of some of the displays and cosplays that give PAX such an impressive air. There were tons more cool cosplays - wish I could have captured more of them on camera!

Behemoth - Tal and I love their adorable art style! Having splurged quite a bit at their booth last year, this time we limited ourselves to one item each: a hoodie for Tal and a bat hat for me!

Balloonicorns from TF2! Tal got me the plushie last year, so I resisted getting a figurine this year... o_O

Tal tried Far Cry 4.

Ziggs and his bomb! I believe Riot had this statue up last year as well.

They had an event at Far Cry 4 where people could line up to get in animal suits and wrestle each other.

Look at that old school Nintendo game cartridge pillow!! And yes, that is a unicorn on one of the pillows.

I have lots more pictures from the event, so I made a Facebook album for them here.

We had Friday and Saturday passes, but we pretty much saw everything on Friday. We were planning on watching live League matches on Saturday (TSM vs. Cloud 9 would have been cool), but we were too exhausted to stick around. Saturday morning was awesome, though, because I finally rescued this dude! We spotted him on Friday (it was love at first howl), but when we went back to get him, he was gone. Thank goodness for restocks!

Tal still plays League regularly and I tried playing it with him for a while last year, but it just wasn't my game. We've since tried reactivating WoW and playing that together, but without a really active guild and a lot of time to spare, that fell off after a few months also). After hearing our friends talk up Diablo 3, we decided to get the expansion and try it out. Wow, have they improved it! We're really excited to have a game to play together. Most of Monday was spent playing D3. o_O

It has been a lot of fun making PAX a tradition for me and Tal. Can't wait to go again next year - maybe I'll even be brave enough to try cosplay! :)

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